Wednesday, June 15, 2005

CAMBRIDGE A Harvard brochure sent to thousands of prospective students included a doctored photo of the student newspaper's front page that removed a headline about the university president facing a confidence vote.

The headline in the Harvard Crimson read "Summers To Face No Confidence Vote." It referred to Harvard President Lawrence Summers, whose comments about women's aptitude for math and science attracted intense controversy earlier this year.

In the brochure, the March 9 headline was replaced with an illegible block of text.

William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid, said the decision to run the altered photo was a mistake made under deadline pressure by the school's admissions office and the Boston design firm that helped produce the brochure.

The error "should not have happened and will not happen again," Fitzsimmons said Monday in a statement. He told the Crimson no Harvard employees have been disciplined as a result of the doctored photo.

Friday, June 10, 2005

School officials are withholding a 17-year-old boy's diploma for wearing a bolo tie under his graduation gown.

Actually, the kid is a Native American and the school broke his balls about wearing the bolo tie instead of a regular one which seems a little petty. That's a pretty strict rule, I'm pretty sure we didn't even have a dress code for under our gowns at my high school graduation.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

MONTEREY, CA—Dogs who attend the Kylee Alternative Training Institute are exposed to a "creative canine learning environment where less emphasis is placed on obedience," director Morgan Kylee said Monday. "We believe in helping our students to discover their own potential, rather than forcing them to conform to the traditional idea of what a dog should be," Kylee said. "Dogs that mess on the carpet or bark incessantly are not scolded, but praised for finding their own parameters. Our motto is 'If it feels good, chew it.'" Classes at the school include Holistic Heeling, Elective Fetching, and Removing The Leg-Humping Stigma.

UPDATE

You know, just for a goof I thought I'd do a low-intensity search for a story to prove the point that The Onion gag is too close to the reality of what a lot people seem to think education is. The first place I looked was Joanne Jacobs and the first thing I read there excerpts this L.A. Times op-ed, appropriately titled "Right, Wrong ...What's the Dif?"

On that same practice test, another student came to me with a problem she had tried to solve; it required comparing two lines on a graph, each of which represented the number of eggs laid by a different group of individuals (female blackbirds nesting in male territories either with or without additional females).

The question asked where a point on one of the lines satisfied a particular condition, and only one answer was correct. The student for some reason had redrawn the lines, as if rewriting the birds' reproductive history, with the two lines suddenly veering off into a fantasy of communal egg-laying. It was as if she had taken a graph of the exports of China and France and merged them into a new country with a single product.

Once again, I explained how to answer the question, and once again the student was pleased. The error was just a trivial difference of opinion. "Yeah, I get it," she said. " I was just thinking of it differently." You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

No, I wanted to say, you weren't thinking of it differently, you had it completely wrong; you didn't understand it at all. But like her many compatriots, she was unlikely to acknowledge that, or admit to a mistake even when she created a version of reality never seen on a map, or in the actions of a blackbird.

Friday, May 13, 2005

It's unfortunate that the HuffPo doesn't have an author archive system; just daily archives so you have to sift to find specific contributors. As it stands now, I'm following the feed that gives me every single post and while I'd rather pass on the Rob Reiner stuff, this guy appears to be worth reading.

Each year, of the 1,600 graduates from the big 4 high schools in South Los Angeles only 900 go to college. Of the 900 who attend college, only 258 graduate from college.

How or why are our public schools in South Los Angeles so utterly broken? Why won’t anybody stand up and be accountable for the total failure of these schools? Some are quick to blame the lack of money, but these 62,000 school children are getting nearly $9,000 in public funds per student for a total of half a billion a year. Half a billion a year and the end result is 258 college graduates a year!!!

There are four special interests that have blocked, clogged, and undermined reform for decades. It is all about money, control, and power. It is diseased value system that leaves our kids uneducated, exposed to violence and drugs, and with too few or zero opportunities to pursue the American Dream. Who are the four? Emphatically, I name names: the teacher’s unions, the University Schools of Education, the bureaucracies, and (unbelievably) the PTA’s.

Monday, April 18, 2005

(Via PowerLine.) This speech by historian David McCollough is [insert fancier way of saying "awesome"]. It's touches on a lot and I wouldn't do it any justice by trying to summarize it so here's just one of the many excellent passages. [Emphasis mine. Also this isn't really a permalink so you may need to search the archives.]

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

And we need not leave the whole job of teaching history to the teachers. If I could have you come away from what I have to say tonight remembering one thing, it would be this: The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sights. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days. Children, particularly little children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the grade school level. We all know that those little guys can learn languages so fast it takes your breath away. They can learn anything so fast it takes your breath away. And the other very important truth is that they want to learn. They can be taught to dissect a cow’s eye. They can be taught anything. And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story. And what’s a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story. And we ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy to put students in that place of those people before us who were just as human, just as real – and maybe in some ways more real than we are. We’ve got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it’s an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

Until I have kids of my own, I try to do my small part in passing on some history to the few kids I know.

Back in the late summer of 2001, I was helping out a college friend with his campaign for the NYC city council. [The primary was to be held on 9/11 but the polls were closed in the late morning.] One night a few weeks before the election after a long day of passing out literature and running the errands that come with a campaign the group of us went back to his campaign HQ. There were probably a dozen of us crammed into a tiny office with no air conditioning. There was some campaign related activity going on but mostly we were decompressing and eating tacos from a local Mexican joint. There about 4 or 5 kids, around Middle School aged, who were dragged along by their mothers who were helping us out.

They were probably tired and started getting antsy and speaking in their "outside voices" in the small confines of the hot office--generally just being kids. They weren't being disruptive, merely annoying. I was beginning to get a headache and pulled a trick my old man used to pull on us and whatever group of kids he was around when they started acting up. (I didn't realize it at the time that it was his move, I just did it without thinking.)

I lined them up and started an American History Trivia Bonanza.

Who was the first black Supreme Court justice?

When is Pearl Harbor Day?

Name the 13 colonies.

And other questions along those lines. It worked in calming them down a bit and if you've ever done something similar, the kids can't wait for the next question. A couple of my other friends joined in with questions and generally the kids were having fun, showing off what the already knew, and maybe learned a few new things.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

A Bronx teacher allegedly bullied a homeless guy--20 years his senior--to take his NYS certification test. The developmentally disabled (Asperger's, actually) homeless guy scored so much higher than the "real teacher" had in his previous attempts that officials became suspicious.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The story of graft by members of the school administation for an affluent neighborhood here on Long Island has been in the local news for about a year now. The NYS Comptroller's office just released its report and while the amount was long-known to be astronomical when you see theft itemized it's just that much more disgusting.

Among other things, the audit found:

--$1,137,939 was used to make payments on private mortgages and loans.

--$609,000 was paid to Home Depot for items not used in the district.

--$249,883 was spent on computers and other electronic equipment delivered to individuals and locations outside the district.

--$206,798 was spent on automobiles, including for a BMW and a Jaguar.

--$133,619 was spent on travel to Las Vegas, San Francisco, Manhattan, New Orleans, and Bermuda, as well as trips to London on the Concorde for Tassone.

Other payments allegedly benefiting Tassone included dry cleaning, cable service, a fitness club, Christmas cards, and personal phone lines. Gluckin allegedly used school funds to pay for water service to her home and a pool cleaner. Rigano allegedly bought a Rolex watch and used school funds to pay for her dry cleaning and hair and nail salons appointments.

Here's Newsday's story which includes a link to the PDF of the State's report.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

I'd like to see Joanne Jacobs' (and the other edu-bloggers) opinion on this story about a guywho went from being a discipline problem with an absentee father and crackhead mother to principal in a Philly school. It looks like he has long way to go...

The school's uniform policy - khaki pants, plaid skirts, collared shirts - suddenly is being enforced. "Tuck your shirt in," Wilson repeats over and again. Tucking is a major project when shirts hang to the knees, and most teens are in no hurry to comply. He waits them out.

"This school is messed up," said Chinee Henry, 14, a ninth grader. "We don't have what white kids have. Debate team, swim club - none of that here. We can't wear what we want. We always have to have our shirt tucked in. What is that?"

Wilson would say it's a start.

But he's getting some support from his teachers.

Other veteran teachers have warmed to the idea of having the equivalent of their worst student return to run the place.

"He's old beyond his years," said Twyla Simpkins, an English teacher and a Chester High grad. "Tough love is a component he's able to bring in. Our kids are needy in that area."